The death of immigration reform

But the meetings succeeded in buying the president a few more months because some, but not all, of the groups did redirect their energies back to the House, where some Republicans quietly pushed forward.

Diaz-Balart had planned to inform House leaders two days after Cantor’s primary reelection that a majority of the conference had shown interest in his bill, according to sources familiar with the process. He wanted a week to firm up the numbers and a commitment to bring it to the floor.

There was no guarantee the plan would’ve succeeded where many others failed. Diaz-Balart had not shown a bill to his colleagues.

But the Republican never had a chance to make the pitch to leadership because of a dramatic twist nobody ever considered that helped kill reform: Cantor lost.

SECOND-GUESSING

The reasons for Cantor’s surprising defeat are complex, but in the post-mortems, the role of immigration reform quickly hardened into conventional wisdom: His support of incremental immigration measures hurt him, and as a result, other Republicans wouldn’t want to touch the issue.

Images of unaccompanied minors surging across the southwestern border only reinforced conservatives’ views that the border isn’t secure.

But its demise was nearly assured even before then, the casualty of missed opportunities, short-term political calculations and unmet expectations.

The Senate debate took longer than the White House had wanted, allowing the lessons of 2012 to fade for House Republicans. The cause suffered a psychic blow when Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a conservative essential to passing the Senate bill, decided not to get involved in the House debate.

Reformers now acknowledge that they made a costly mistake by not focusing more of their firepower on the House earlier, even before the Senate bill gained traction.

“It didn’t take a political genius to see that the House was challenging,” said Cesar Vargas of the pro-reform Dream Action Coalition. “We should’ve focused on the [Raul] Labradors, the Cantors back then, when there was more momentum, more encouraging pressure.”

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), part of the bipartisan group of eight House lawmakers who tried and ultimately failed to hammer out their own comprehensive bill, said the lack of attention to the House early in 2013 was a “huge problem.”

“As we began the fight, every resource, all energy, all focus, was on the Senate,” Gutierrez said.

Once the Senate passed its bill, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a key leader in the upper chamber for reform, embarked on a campaign to persuade House Republicans. He kept meticulous spreadsheets of more than 100 GOP lawmakers who might let reform proceed and convened calls with key activists to urge them to keep pushing. The senator logged the hundreds of conversations as data-backed proof that House Republicans were at least hearing from supporters.

Still, others believed some immigration advocates wrote off too many House Republicans as unpersuadable. One example cited in numerous interviews was that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spoke out forcefully for an overhaul, but never punished lawmakers who weren’t pro-reform by refusing donations or endorsements.

“There’s the Steve Kings who you’re never going to get … and the John Carters, who you basically have,” said Tamar Jacoby, president and CEO of the business group ImmigrationWorks USA. “But there are a lot of people in the middle. I don’t think we , enough, took the argument to them.”

Reformers relied heavily on a strong Senate showing. The Gang of Eight believed if they drove up the number of votes, the House would be pressured to act quickly. Schumer touted his 70-vote strategy as essential.

The Senate bill got 68 votes — impressive, but still never enough to prompt House action. And a majority of Senate Republicans voted against the legislation — a key number that the bill’s opponents used to their advantage.

Members of the Gang of Eight said they don’t believe they miscalculated by aiming high, although Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said they shouldn’t have set a target. Menendez said the policy concessions made to reach the 70-vote mark would have largely been the same as what the senators would’ve had to do to break the filibuster-proof 60-vote barrier.

But liberal advocates said the 70-vote threshold caused Senate negotiators to give away too much, too soon — like the so-called “border surge” amendment cobbled together in the last days of the Senate fight.

Provisions like the border surge, which was credited with securing multiple GOP votes for the overall bill, should have been saved as bargaining chips when the battle moved to the House, the advocates said.

But it’s unclear whether that strategy would have worked. One year later, Rubio said he repeatedly warned the Gang of Eight that the lack of effective border security would derail the bill in the House.

The “fundamental hang-up,” Rubio said, was that House Republicans wanted assurances that border security would be in place before legalization occurred — a demand that would never fly in the Democratic-led Senate.

“Every time I would bring that up during the negotiations, people would say, ‘He’s trying to back out of the deal’ or ‘he’s trying to blow the deal up’ and it wasn’t the case,” Rubio said during an interview. “It’s because I could see, having been in communications with the House, where they were headed on it, how strongly they felt about it.”

“Unless we can get to a point where [House Republicans] believed — and the majority of the American people believed — that the enforcement was going to happen, it was going to be very difficult to address the issue of those who are here illegally,” he said. “I knew that before, I warned about it during, and it’s only proven true since.”

Despite the lack of action, reformers said an evolution has occurred. The debate is no longer about whether an overhaul of the system must occur, but rather when it should be done.

After their struggle over the past year, some activists said their only solution might be a long-term strategy to flip control of the House back to Democrats, while holding the Senate and the White House.

“Our biggest mistake was that we believed Republicans wanted to change course after the 2012 election,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, who has been working on the issue in Washington for more than two decades. “I don’t believe we will make that mistake again.”